What do you need to know before ordering a website.
If you decided that your business needs to make a step forward and get more customers, one of the great ways to do it is creating a website. In our times more people are getting access to Internet and every other person can afford to buy a computer. Everything is becoming more accessible through the Internet (whether you need to check store hours, directions, products availability in the stores, prices and many more). So, as you can see, creating a website and describing everything that is going on in your store or company is not such a bad idea. OK, let me get closer to our topic.
Before ordering a website you need to make sure that you have the information needed to create your website. Here are the questions which you will be asked:
1. How many pages would you like to have (depending on the business that you have it may vary from simple 5 pages to hundreds)? Usually for local business I wouldn’t publish too many pages with bunch of unnecessary information. Sometimes customers need just simple information, such as what you sell, what is the price, maybe review the pictures of the product and how to contact you. So, I would suggest 5-7 pages (for example, home, products, prices, gallery, contact etc.) You need to decide which pages you want your customers to have access to.
2. Generate content for you website, which is, honestly, always a pain in the neck. After I learned how to create websites and was ready to make something for myself, I understood that I don’t have enough text for my website to make it more interesting. Now I am learning how to write articles. So, don’t kill the messenger if you will see some errors. This is my first article. Let’s go back to content. You need to write approximately 10-15 lines of description of what your business is all about. You may add something about yourself. Maybe add pictures of you, your products or service and place where you are located or something like that. It will be very simple, but it will do the job. It will give your customers a good idea about your business or organization. They will find out more details when they will visit your business.
3. Choose your main colors. Not more then 2-3.
4. When you order a website, you need buy a domain name and hosting. Usually it is not included in the price for the website. The money goes to third parties companies. This is going to be more technical information, but we have to go through it.
To have website you need to buy domain name (more info about domain names you may find here or here. A domain name is the name of your website like www.google.com. A person who makes your website usually already has a few domain-selling companies for consideration in mind. The price for a domain name usually varies from $5 to $15 per year. Not very expensive as you can see. Secondly, you need hosting (more info about hosting you may fine here or here). In simple words, hosting is a certain amount of space that you rent on the Internet. All files for your website will be uploaded to this space. Rent for hosting is usually from 6-20$ per month. So you have to take it to your consideration.
Also some companies provide free hosting (space). But, as you already know, everything that is free has some ...let’s call them defects.
Some people can deal with those defects or limitations, some can not. My next project will be about creating a website that will be dedicated to information about free hosting and companies that provide free hosting. So, you probably will ask me “what defects does free hosting have?”. There are many of them, but here is a couple:
a) Free hosting companies publish their information, ads and banners on your website.
b) Name of you website (domain name) will be something like http://www.yourcompanyname.hostingcompanyname.com. It will be very hard for your customers to remember the name of your website. You care about them, right?! Sometimes these companies may have really weird name and it is not going to sound professional for your company.
c) Space that they provide with free hosting may not be enough for your website.
d) Speed to download your website may be too low. Some people don’t have enough patience to wait and may just leave your website without getting to know about your company.
There are many more defects and if you want to read about them check here.
5. Choose the way you want your website to be created. Managing a website is a bigger task than creating it. If you don’t want to pay someone money to add or delete something from your website after it was created, you probably want your website to be made using one of the CMS systems (content management system) such as Joomla, WordPress, Drupal etc. With these systems, you don’t need any coding knowledge. It is very easy to use for everybody. Of course, you will need to dedicate some time to understand how it works. There are some pros and cons about CMS and custom made websites. I will write about them in my next articles here and here.
I know that not everyone will agree with me about some aspects of this article, but everyone has different experience. I describe my own experience, so, don’t judge me too hard. Overall it is my first article and English is not my native language. My first languages are Ukrainian and Russian.
Read my articles and let me know if you have a question, comment, or concern.
Thank you for your time.
